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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25341997">Burnt Offerings</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunaddicted/pseuds/sunaddicted'>sunaddicted</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>007 Games Fics 2k20 [17]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>James Bond (Craig movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Character Study, Emotional Hurt, Fire, Implied/Referenced Torture, Light Angst, M/M, Near Death Experiences, Nightmares, Past Character Death, Post-Skyfall, References to Depression</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 06:07:34</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,400</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25341997</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunaddicted/pseuds/sunaddicted</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>If he let the fire consume him, would the smoke carry his ashes up to the sky? Would he feel less lonely then, scattered amidst the stars? </p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>James Bond/Q</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>007 Games Fics 2k20 [17]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1794529</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>007 Fest Fancreations</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Burnt Offerings</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is my fill for the "Blaze" prompt of the Angst Prompt Table.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>
    <span>Burnt Offerings</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>James couldn’t exactly pinpoint the exact moment when his most recent dream had turned into a nightmare - what he knew for sure, it was that the setting and the scenery weren’t exactly new and while he couldn’t fully predict which path his mind would take, which details it would pick out and transform into black pearls of horror, he wasn’t completely harmless, at least: there was some bracing he could do, there were barriers he could throw up to protect himself from the worst of it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He was sadly used to nightmares and, to a certain extent, James had learnt to steer them away from the worst direction; he never managed to completely turn them into something good that he wouldn’t have minded remembering the day after but he wasn’t going to look at a gifted horse in the mouth: sometimes, blessings were small and seemingly worthless but James knew perfectly well the kind of darkness that could get dredged up from his unconscious, gathered there one mission after the other - accumulating day after day, every little horror amalgamating into one shapeless nightmarish blob.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>James looked up at the burning house: the blaze was far bigger than he had thought it would be, considering the fact that most of its structure was built out of stone, damp and sweaty with the collected mugginess of the moors it was immersed in; there was a lot of wood inside, James wasn’t going to deny that, but he had never thought that Skyfall would burn down so fast and so bright, its black silhouette crumbling here and there as the orange and yellow flames licked at it, consuming it like a tongue lapping away at an ice cream ball - hungry, careless of the destruction left behind.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Seeing the old manor on fire wasn’t painful per se: James hadn’t lived in it for far too long to be attached to the material aspect of the house - it had just been a possession relegated at the back of his mind, popping up at the forefront of his thoughts whenever he checked his bank statements and saw the sizeable transfer he regularly sent Kincade for keeping Skyfall from completely falling into ruin. James wasn’t completely sure about why he even did that, to be honest; in a remote future in which he would get to retire, having survived playing the field as a Double-Oh against all odds and his hopes, he had never even briefly entertained the thought of moving back out to the family estate, isolated in the highlands of Scotland - it just wasn’t a secretly coveted desire.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Maybe he would have sold the house after Kincade’s passing - maybe it was the old family friend’s attachment to Skyfall that had kept James from getting rid of it but it didn’t ring true, not when Kincade himself had seen fit to sell it off when he had gotten wind of his presumed death.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>If only</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>James walked closer, uncaring of the painful heat against his arms: it wasn’t real, it couldn’t really injure him, and the pain was sobering, it helped him to stay focused on the rational voice in his head that soothingly reminded him of the fact that he was just trapped in a bad dream - that the twisting and turning of his intestines was just a visceral reaction to seeing his childhood home being consumed by a bonfire that had been fuelled by the desperate need for revenge that had kept a dead man walking and breathing despite the cyanide that had corroded him alive, eating at his insides just like the fire was eating at the manor.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was fitting, in a way.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Poetic</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>His eyes started to well with tears and James was aware that not all of them were because of the heat and the ashes that were irritating his lids and eyeballs - that there was emotion in them, laced together with the salt that would leave behind slightly translucent tracks on his skin: barely visible traces in theory, but easily spottable in practice. He had to wonder if it was a distinctively human ability honed on by millennia of socialisation, the skill of picking out the telltale diaphanous pathways that tears drew on the skin; it didn’t really seem like such a far-fetched theory, it was well-known that humans had developed plenty of skills that were solely related to interacting with other human beings - nature’s way to favour the survival of the species.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>James couldn’t exactly extrapolate where the emotional pain was coming from: there were plenty of memories tied to the place, floating like ghosts amidst the peaks of the flames that hadn’t lost any of their vehemence yet - their hunger was still to be sated, they would keep eating and eating until the only things left behind would be the scorched moors and maybe the skeleton of a house, glowing almost neon-orange in the night like a timber in the hearth.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Burnt offerings to Silva’s vengeful altar.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>His feet were uncomfortably hot in his shoes now, it was as if the leather was soaking up the warmth from the ground; if he kept walking closer and closer to the entrance where the fire danced on the entry pathway, its maws closed on the wild remains of what once had been curated hedges and bushes, the shoes’ soles would start to melt away into his socks and the flesh of his feet, making it impossible to walk without every step feeling like absolute torture - one of the kind James didn’t even need to put too much imagination too, considering the not-so-creative use of branding irons he had had to endure at the hands of some of his captors.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A wall crumbled, the noise loud enough to startle him: it had sounded like the crashing of a wave against the shore - the kind that made the beach tremble beneath one’s feet with its violence, its inexorable power pervading the sand and climbing its way up legs and bodies to shake them to the core. Something stirred in James’ chest, briefly making it hard to breathe as the roaring of the blaze was momentarily drowned out by the furious thumping of his heart.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>His parents had leaned against that wall. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Olivia Mansfield too. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>They were all dead, they had left him behind to watch an old house collapse on itself, devoured inside out - an empty husk that only made him feel abandoned; alone; forsaken. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Breathing became even harder, the air burning his airways because of the unbearable, boiling heat and the acrid smoke, even blacker than the night that was descending upon the Scottish highlands; he could make it out against the sky, as blue as the velvet one could find at a jeweller's, dotted by stars that shone as bright as the rawest of diamonds - the poisonous ghost of death pervading the air, veiling the beauty of the galaxy blinking down at him cold and more distant than James could wrap his head around. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>If he let the fire consume him, would the smoke carry his ashes up to the sky? Would he feel less lonely then, scattered amidst the stars? </span>
</p><p>
  <span>James wished he had an answer to that question - the only thing he knew was that he shouldn't follow that train of thought, it was a dangerous path to walk down to. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He forced himself awake and he wasn't surprised to feel the tears on his face as he blinked his eyes open, pupils fixed on the time the bedside table alarm clock projected one bright blue light on the ceiling; Q had been the one to choose the colour, claiming that red was too anxiety-inducing and that green would be too bright for him to rest properly - James hadn't really cared, he had never felt the need to have the time projected on the ceiling: it was one of those uselessly ultra technological things that Q had brought in his flat, together with two excessively grumpy cats and a mountain of electronics that had ended up dumped on a desk hastily propped up in a corner of the living room. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>They had been annoying things at the begging. Now, as James turned his head to the side to watch Q snore with his mouth slightly open, they just were things that made him think of home - that reminded him that he wasn't so alone afterall. </span>
</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>As anything involving fire, this was pretty hard for me to write - don't you love it when you're irrationally scared of dying burned alive? Lmao</p></blockquote></div></div>
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